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Yet another anachronistic regulator is trying to flex its muscles over the Internet. But this time the U.S. government is actually the one trying to stop them.

That’s right. It’s the United Nations. Specifically, the International Telecommunications Union, a 150 year-old bureaucracy that started life establishing telegraph standards. The ITU has since mutated into coordinating international telephone interconnection and radio spectrum, and became part of the U.N. in 1947. But it has never had a meaningful role in dealing with the Internet.

At least until now.

That could change dramatically later this year, when 193 member nations and hundreds of non-voting private members will meet in Dubai for the World Conference on International Telecommunications, or WCIT. The goal of the WCIT is to finalize changes to the International Telecommunications Regulations, an international treaty on communications.

The last major revisions to the ITRs were ratified in 1988, long before the rise of the commercial Internet. But with months to go before proposed changes to the ITR are closed, member nations and private members of the ITU have already begun lobbying for a vast expansion of Internet powers, including new network taxes, mandatory censorship technologies disguised as security measures, and efforts to undermine the Internet’s longstanding engineering-based governance processes.

Worse, Internet users who object to proposed changes may not even know what to complain about or who to complain to. Following ITU rules, the proposals are being circulated and deliberated in secret, making it difficult to know what is being proposed and who users can hold accountable.

Caught flat-footed, the ITU’s governing Council half-heartedly agreed to publish just one of the documents already leaked, with the names of members making the proposals redacted. ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Toure called that move a “landmark decision,” and insists in the face of the ITU’s secrecy that the agency “is as transparent as organizations are.”

That might give you some sense of just how out of touch the agency really is. And at least within the U.S., condemnation of the ITU’s dangerously amateurish behavior has been universal. Republicans and Democrats, Congress, the White House and the FCC, along with major industry representatives, consumer advocates, and engineering groups including the highly-respected and international Internet Society, have all raised alarms over both the content and the process of upcoming negotiations.

Last week, the U.S. delegation issued its own first round of proposals, making clear that the U.S. “will not support proposals that increase the exercise of control over Internet governance or content.” That followed passage in the House last week of a strongly-worded anti-WCIT resolution. The vote in favor of the resolution was unanimous.

The U.S., however, only gets one vote at the WCIT meeting. And even if the Senate refuses to ratify a new version of the ITRs passed over U.S. objections, other countries will be able to impose new rules on U.S. companies doing business abroad, backed up by the authority of the U.N.. At the very worst, a bad result at the WCIT could lead to a splintered Internet, and the further isolation of developing nations.

Why is this Happening?

From the beginning, the Internet has been governed almost exclusively by the engineers who designed it and who continue to enhance and extend its capabilities. The core standards and protocols are overseen by the Internet Engineering Task Force. Website domain names and IP addresses are registered by ICANN. And the constant redesign of the Web itself is the job of the World Wide Web Consortium. These are all multi-stakeholder, non-governmental organizations, beholden only to the over two billion Internet users around the world.

It’s not much of a stretch to say that the Internet works as well as it does precisely because it has managed to stay largely immune from interference and oversight from traditional governments—slow-moving, expensive, secretive, jealous, partisan governments.